In Theatre, W. Somerset Maugham–the author of the classicnovels Of Human Bondage and Up at the Villa–introduces us to JuliaLambert, a woman of breathtaking poise and talent whose looks havestood by her forty-six years. She is one of the greatest actressesEngland–so good, in fact, that perhaps she never stopsacting. It seems that noting can ruffle her satin feathers, until a quietstranger who challenges Julia's very sense of self. As a result,she will endure rejection for the first time, her capacity as amother will be affronted, and her ability to put on whatever faceshe desired for her public will prove limited. In Theatre, Maughamsubtly exposes the tensions and triumphs that occur when acting andreality blend together, and–for Julia–ultimately reverse.

Every night for three years the vengeful King Shahriyar sleepswith a different virgin, executing her next morning. To end thisbrutal pattern and to save her own life, the vizier's daughter,Shahrazad, begins to tell the king tales of adventure, love, richesand wonder - tales of mystical lands peopled with princes andhunchbacks, the Angel of Death and magical spirits, tales of thevoyages of Sindbad, of Ali Baba's outwitting a band of fortythieves and of jinnis trapped in rings and in lamps. The sequenceof stories will last 1,001 nights.

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) Though James Joyce began thesestories of Dublin life in 1904 when he was twenty-two and completedthem in 1907, their unconventional themes and language led torepeated rejections by publishers and delayed publication until1914. In the century since, his story "The Dead" has come to beseen as one of the most powerful evocations of human loss andlonging that the English language possesses; all the other storiesin "Dubliners" are as beautifully turned and as greatly admired.They remind us once again that James Joyce was not only modernism'schief innovator but also one of its most intimate and poeticwriters. In this edition the text has been revised in keeping withJoyce's wishes, and the original versions of "The Sisters,""Eveline," and "After the Race" have been made available in anappendix, along with Joyce's suppressed preface to the 1914 editionof "Dubliners."

Dumas's most popular novel has long been a favorite withchildren, and its swashbuckling heroes are well known from many afilm and TV adaptation. Set in 17th-century France, this tale ofthe adventures of D'Artagnan and the three musketeers is the finestexample of its author's brilliantly inventive storytellinggenius.

One of the towering figures of world literature, Goethe hasnever held quite as prominent a place in the English-speaking worldas he deserves. This collection of his four major works, togetherwith a selection of his finest letters and poems, shows that he isnot only one of the very greatest European writers: he is alsoaccessible, entertaining, and contemporary. The Sorrows of Young Wertheris a story of self-destructive love that made its author acelebrity overnight at the age of twenty-five. Its exploration ofthe conflicts between ideas and feelings, between circumstance anddesire, continues in his controversial novel probing theinstitution of marriage, Elective Affinities. The cosmic drama ofFaust goes far beyond the realism of the novels in a poeticexploration of good and evil, while Italian Journey, written in theauthor’s old age, recalls his youth in Italy and the impact ofMediterranean culture on a young northerner.

A brilliant new translation of the work that Herman Hessecalled "the first great masterpiece of European storytelling." Inthe summer of 1348, with the plague ravaging Florence, ten youngmen and women take refuge in the countryside, where they entertainthemselves with tales of love, death, and corruption, featuring ahost of characters, from lascivious clergymen and mad kings todevious lovers and false miracle-makers. Named after the Greek for"ten days," Boccaccio's book of stories draws on ancient mythology,contemporary history, and everyday life, and has influenced thework of myriad writers who came after him. J. G. Nichols's newtranslation, faithful to the original but rendered in eminentlyreadable modern English, captures the timeless humor of one of thegreat classics of European literature.

Here are the best of Hawthorne's short stories. There aretwenty-four of them -- not only the most familiar, but also manythat are virtually unknown to the average reader. The selection wasmade by Professor Newton Arvin of Smith College, a recognizedauthority on Hawthorne and a distinguished literary critic as well.His fine introduction admirably interprets Hawthorne's mind andart.

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) Dostoevsky's most revolutionarynovel, "Notes from Underground" marks the dividing line betweennineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction, and between the visionsof self each century embodied. One of the most remarkablecharacters in literature, the unnamed narrator is a former officialwho has defiantly withdrawn into an underground existence. In fullretreat from society, he scrawls a passionate, obsessive,self-contradictory narrative that serves as a devastating attack onsocial utopianism and an assertion of man's essentially irrationalnature. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, whose Dostoevskytranslations have become the standard, give us a brilliantlyfaithful edition of this classic novel, conveying all the tragedyand tormented comedy of the original.

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) Alexandre Dumas's epic novel ofjustice, retribution, and self-discovery--one of the mostenduringly popular adventure tales ever written--in a newly revisedtranslation. This beloved novel tells the story of Edmond Dantes,wrongfully imprisoned for life in the supposedly impregnable seafortress, the Chateau d'If. After a daring escape, and afterunearthing a hidden treasure revealed to him by a fellow prisoner,he devotes the rest of his life to tracking down and punishing theenemies who wronged him. Though a brilliant storyteller, Dumas wasgiven to repetitions and redundancies; this slightly streamlinedversion of the original 1846 English translation speeds thenarrative flow while retaining most of the rich pictorialde*ions and all the essential details of Dumas's intricatelyplotted and thrilling masterpiece.

The early masterpiece of V. S. Naipaul’s brilliant career, AHouse for Mr. Biswas is an unforgettable story inspired byNaipaul's father that has been hailed as one of the twentiethcentury's finest novels. In his forty-six short years, Mr. Mohun Biswas has been fightingagainst destiny to achieve some semblance of independence, only toface a lifetime of calamity. Shuttled from one residence to anotherafter the drowning death of his father, for which he isinadvertently responsible, Mr. Biswas yearns for a place he cancall home. But when he marries into the domineering Tulsi family onwhom he indignantly becomes dependent, Mr. Biswas embarks on anarduous–and endless–struggle to weaken their hold over him andpurchase a house of his own. A heartrending, dark comedy ofmanners, A House for Mr. Biswas masterfully evokes a man’s questfor autonomy against an emblematic post-colonial canvas.

This is a fully annotated edition of all the poems which are nowgenerally regarded as Shakespeare's, excluding the Sonnets. Itcontains Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, The Phoenix and theTurtle, The Passionate Pilgrim, and A Lover's Complaint. Theintroduction to the two long narrative poems examines their placewithin the classical and Renaissance European traditions, an issuewhich also applies to The Phoenix and the Turtle. John Roe analysesthe conditions in which the collection was produced, and weighs theevidence for and against Shakespeare's authorship of A Lover'sComplaint and the much-debated question of its genre. Hedemonstrates how in his management of formal tropes Shakespeare,like the best Elizabethans, fashions a living language out ofhandbook oratory. This updated edition contains a new introductorysection on recent critical interpretations and an updated readinglist.

Newlyweds Jennifer and Matt really love each other. They never lived together before they were married-and so both were shocked to learn all the little things that go with living with one's spouse. Who knew that in his family, Saturdays were for tackling chores, while in her family Saturdays were for sleeping late? Now, two nice people from nice families are finding out that they do everything differently-and suddenly, they're in the ring with gloves on! Week by week, the fights take both of them by surprise-they never meant to be the kind of couple that acts this way. Simultaneously, though, Jennifer and Matt are building something strong, knocking down old walls of habit and finding the strong foundation of a love that will see them through.This is one year in a marriage-the beginning of a lifetime.

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) "Mrs. Dalloway "chronicles aJune day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway-a day that is taken upwith running minor errands in preparation for a party and that ispunctuated, toward the end, by the suicide of a young man she hasnever met. In giving an apparently ordinary day such immenseresonance and significance-infusing it with the elemental conflictbetween death and life-Virginia Woolf triumphantly discovers herdistinctive style as a novelist. Originally published in 1925,"Mrs. Dalloway "is Woolf's first complete rendering of what shedescribed as the "luminous envelope" of consciousness: a dazzlingdisplay of the mind's inside as it plays over the brilliant surfaceand darker depths of reality. This edition uses the text of theoriginal British publication of "Mrs. Dalloway," which includeschanges Woolf made that never appeared in the first or subsequentAmerican editions.

Jane Austen chronicles the subtleties and nuances of- and theaspirations and machinations at work in - her own social milieu.Through the stories of her spirited heroines and their circles,their interactions and rituals, their movements from ballrooms todrawing rooms, from London and Bath to parklands and gardens, sherecreates the life of The English gentry that she observed in thelate eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Each of her novels is a love story and a story about marriage -marriage for love, for financial security, for social status. Butthey are not romances; ironic, comic, wise and penetrating, theyare brilliant portrayals of the society Jane Austen knew.

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) The story of HesterPrynne-found out in adultery, pilloried by her Puritan community,and abandoned, in different ways, by both her partner in sin andher vengeance-seeking husband-possesses a reality heightened byHawthorne's pure human sympathy and his unmixed devotion to hissupposedly fallen but fundamentally innocent heroine. In its moralforce and the beauty of its conciliations, "The Scarlet Letter"rightly deserves its stature as the first great novel written by anAmerican, the novel that announced an American literature equal toany in the world.

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) Of all Jane Austen's great anddelightful novels, "Persuasion" is widely regarded as the mostmoving. It is the story of a second chance. Anne Elliot, daughterof the snobbish, spendthrift Sir Walter Elliot, is a woman of quietcharm and deep feelings. When she was nineteen, she fell in lovewith-and was engaged to-a naval officer, the fearless andheadstrong Captain Wentworth. But the young man had no fortune, andAnne allowed herself to be persuaded, against her profoundestinstinct, to give him up.Now, at twenty-seven, and believing thatshe has lost her bloom, Anne is startled to learn that CaptainWentworth has returned to the neighborhood, a rich man and stillunwed. Her never-diminished love is muffled by her pride. He seemscold and unforgiving. Even worse, he appears to be infatuated bythe flighty and pretty Louisa Musgrove. What happens as Anne andWentworth are thrown together in the social world of Bath-and as aneager new suitor appears for Anne-is touchingly and wittily told in

The Portrait of a Lady is the most stunning achievement ofHenry James's early period--in the 1860s and '70s when he wastransforming himself from a talented young American into a residentof Europe, a citizen of the world, and one of the greatestnovelists of modern times. A kind of delight at the success of thistransformation informs every page of this masterpiece. IsabelArcher, a beautiful, intelligent, and headstrong American girlnewly endowed with wealth and embarked in Europe on a treacherousjourney to self-knowledge, is delineated with a magnificence thatis at once casual and tense with force and insight. The characterswith whom she is entangled--the good man and the evil one, betweenwhom she wavers, and the mysterious witchlike woman with whom shemust do battle--are each rendered with a virtuosity that suggestsdazzling imaginative powers. And the scene painting--in England andItaly--provides a continuous visual pleasure while always remainingcrucial to the larger drama.

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) Though its fame as an icon oftwentieth-century literature rests primarily on the brilliance ofits narrative technique and the impressionistic beauty of itsprose, "To the Lighthouse "is above all the story of a quest, andas such it possesses a brave and magical universality. Observedacross the years at their vacation house facing the gales of theNorth Atlantic, Mrs. Ramsay and her family seek to recapturemeaning from the flux of things and the passage of time. Though itis the death of Mrs. Ramsay on which the novel turns, her presencepervades every page in a poetic evocation of loss and memory thatis also a celebration of domestic life and its most intimatedetails. Virginia Woolf's great book enacts a powerful allegory ofthe creative consciousness and its momentary triumphs over fleetingmaterial life.

FROM AWARD-WINNING TRANSLATORS, Amasterful newtranslation--never before pub-lished---of the novel in which FyodorDostoevskyset out to portray a truly beautiful soul. Just two years after completing CrimeandPunishment, Dostoevsky produced a second novelwith a verydifferent man at its center. InThe Idiot, the saintly PrinceMyshkin returns toRussia from a Swiss sanatorium and findshim-selfa stranger in a society obsessed with wealth,power, andsexual conquest. He soon becomesentangled in a love triangle with anotoriouskept woman, Nastasya, and a beautiful younggirl, Aglaya.Extortion and scandal escalate tomurder, as Dostoevsky's"positively beautifulman" clashes with the emptiness of asocietythat cannot accommodate his innocence andmoral idealism. TheIdiot is both a powerfulindictment of that society and a rich andgrip-ping masterpiece.

With passion, wit, and good common sense, the celebrated poetMary Oliver tells of the basic ways a poem is built-meter andrhyme, form and diction, sound and sense. Drawing on poems fromRobert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and others, Oliver imparts anextraordinary amount of information in a remarkably short space."Stunning" (Los Angeles Times). Index.

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) Penelope Fitzgerald, who diedin 2000, emerged late in life as one of the most remarkable Englishwrit ers of the last century. She began her writing career in 1975at the age of fifty-nine, and over the next two decades shepublished three biographies, nine novels, and a collection of shortstories. Now three of her acclaimed novels are gathered here in onevolume. "The Bookshop "is a postwar tragicomedy of manners, set inan isolated seaside town where an enterprising woman opens abookstore only to find it beset by poltergeists, weather, andhostile townsfolk. "The Gate of Angels "is an Edwardian romancewithin a novel of ideas: a young doctor devoted to science and tohis all-male Cambridge college finds his life and views disruptedby a nurse named Daisy. "The Blue Flower," " "which won theNational Book Critics Circle Award, revitalizes historical dramathrough the story of Novalis, an eighteenth-century German romanticpoet and visionary genius, and his unlikely love affair wit

" A stranger could drive through Miguel Street and just say 'Slum ' because he could see no more." But to its residents thisderelict corner of Trinidad' s capital is a complete world, whereeverybody is quite different from everybody else. There' s Popo thecarpenter, who neglects his livelihood to build " the thing withouta name." There' s Man-man, who goes from running for public officeto staging his own crucifixion, and the dreaded Big Foot, the bullywith glass tear ducts. There' s the lovely Mrs. Hereira, in thrallto her monstrous husband. In this tender, funny early novel, V. S.Naipaul renders their lives (and the legends their neighborsconstruct around them) with Dickensian verve and Chekhoviancompassion.Set during World War II and narrated by an unnamed- butprecociously observant- neighborhood boy, Miguel Street is a workof mercurial mood shifts, by turns sweetly melancholy andanarchically funny. It overflows with life on every page.